| Sweet Honey Bee | |
| Type: | studio |
| Artist: | Duke Pearson |
| Cover: | Sweet Honey Bee.jpg |
| Released: | 1967 |
| Recorded: | December 7, 1966 |
| Studio: | Van Gelder Studio, Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey |
| Genre: | Jazz |
| Length: | 39:27 |
| Label: | Blue Note BST 84252 |
| Producer: | Alfred Lion |
| Prev Title: | Prairie Dog |
| Prev Year: | 1966 |
| Next Title: | The Right Touch |
| Next Year: | 1967 |
Sweet Honey Bee is an album by American jazz pianist and composer Duke Pearson, released on the Blue Note label in 1967.[1] The woman on the cover was Pearson's fiancee Betty.[2]
Allmusic awarded the album with 4 stars and its review by Scott Yanow states: "Pianist/composer Duke Pearson leads an all-star group on this run-through of seven of his compositions. The musicians (trumpeter Freddie Hubbard, altoist James Spaulding, Joe Henderson on tenor, bassist Ron Carter, drummer Mickey Roker, and the pianist/leader) are actually more impressive than many of the compositions, although the swinging minor-toned "Big Bertha" deserved to become a standard."[3] The Penguin Guide review says: "the highlights are the lushly voiced melodies of 'Sudel' and 'Gaslight', the former a tune which Pearson had recorded some years earlier with a different group. Hubbard and Henderson eat up their solo opportunities without sundering the essentially easy-going feel which was [a] Pearson trademark, and while not all the material is up to this standard, as a showcase for the pianist as writer and group-leader, this is surely the best thing available at present [2004]."
In David Mitchell's novel Ghostwritten, Satoru, a young Japanese jazz-lover working in a record shop in Tokyo, says of a girl who comes into the store, "if you know Duke Pearson's 'After the Rain,' well, she was as beautiful and pure as that."[4]
All compositions by Duke Pearson.